The demand for trained and educated national security lawyers, including those in the military, is not going to lessen. The challenge is to meet the increasing demand with shrinking resources. The military services must first identify national security law as a core, mission-essential discipline. The services should integrate the joint and perhaps inter-agency legal community […]

Throughout its fifty-year history, the American Bar Association (ABA) Standing Committee on Law and National Security (SCOLANS) has strived to address the most important national security law issues and advance understanding among members of the bar and the public. In recent years, SCOLANS has recognized the importance of educating the next generation of lawyers to advise clients concerning […]

This article challenges the dominant pedagogical assumptions in the legal academy. It begins by briefly considering the state of the field of national security law, noting the rapid expansion in employment and the breadth of related positions that have been created post-9/11. It considers, in the process, how the legal academy has, as an institutional matter, responded to the […]

Professor Wasserman offers several evaluations of the Supreme Court’s 1872 decision in Klein. In places he states that it was issued in a “pathological period,” is confusing to read, and therefore difficult to apply. Yet elsewhere in his article he finds the decision to be understandable and recognizes that it offers several clear separation of powers principles. Between those two competing and conflicting positions, the latter analysis is on firmer ground.

No one seriously claims that the Supreme Court’s 1872 decision in United States v. Klein is a model of clarity. Justice Field’s opinion for the Court is as enigmatic as it is intriguing, providing the only pre-2008 example of a Supreme Court decision invalidating an Act of Congress for unconstitutionally depriving the federal courts of jurisdiction. The million dollar question, of course, is why the Court so ruled, and no amount of scholarship, no matter the quality of the analysis or the intellectual abilities of the author, has managed to settle the issue to any meaningful degree.

Current Issue

In Vol. 7 No. 3, authors address a number of compelling national security issues, including targeting under international humanitarian law (Michael N. Schmitt and Eric W. Widmar); insight into the NSA’s practice of providing security to private companies (Susan Landau); creative ways to limit overclassification (Herbert S. Lin); the evolution of explosive weapons and their effect on the development of international law (Barry Kellman); and bringing prolonged Guantanamo detention and criminal prosecution into closer alignment (Norman Abrams). The issue also includes a review, by Spike Bowman, of Bob Gates’ Duty.